WiiFin – Jellyfin Client for Nintendo Wii
github.com89 points by throwawayk7h 4 hours ago
89 points by throwawayk7h 4 hours ago
Noticed that Jellyfin had inched out Plex when sorting by popularity on the TrueNAS app catalogue the other day (45,178 installs vs Plex's 42,225). The existance of this project seems to confirm that the dev ecosystem around it is getting stronger!
Plex could reverse this trend in a week if they decided to prioritize work on any feature that their core market actually wanted.
What more does Plex need? I would consider myself a power user of Plex and it does everything I need it to do. I would think the only thing I can think of is fully self-hosted login instead of their cloud option, but I'm glad we have that option because I don't want to handle the authentication of my friends and family
It needs more of the feature that makes it a networked player for the media I already have (which works great -- once a person gets to it), and less of the misfeature that is the sideshow also-ran ad-supported and rental live streaming and on-demand offerings (which I will never, ever use -- and that Jellyfin lacks altogether).
Plex been swinging in the wrong direction for a number of years now.
The poster you're asking this to is probably talking about plug-ins. Plex, very long ago, supported plug-ins, but it no longer does. Plug-ins were usually for adding in support for other media scrapers (porn and anime), or even other media types, like audiobooks.
Additionally, Plex tends to revise their UI and inner workings in a way that favors everything but the core media sharing platform. They add TV stations, they mix in their streaming ad-supported channels with your search results, and push them before the friends and family stuff, making it tough to help other navigate to shared libraries.
I think, overall, Plex is a good shepherd for their product, but everyone knows the enshitificaiton process is inevitable. It's just a question of how long the timeline between "Plex is usable" and "Plex is sold to private equity and is now utter shit." I've been pleasantly surprised with the length, so far. But having an escape hatch is always a good idea, and Jellyfin seems to be nearing a parity.
Can anyone comment on the security of Jellyfin? When I had last looked into it, it seemed like Jellyfin had a somewhat weak security model that made me question switching family members to it from Plex.
Don't expose it to the internet unless you know what you're doing, or put it on a VPS you don't care about.
Ideally keep it behind a VPN and give your family members access to it that way, and let local devices on your LAN connect to it without a VPN.
Those are fine ideas.
But I'm not all about getting something like Tailscale to work with my elderly mother's Roku device, nor teaching her how to use it.
I started out my home server journey with Plex but it just kept getting worse, forcing me to switch to Jellyfin, which imo works just as well and seems to not fall into the whole pay us to stream your media business practice yet. Paywalling such a core feature was pretty harsh
Jellyfin is great in that it just works. I managed to install it on Samsung TV with Tizen OS and it has been just solid experience for many years now.
The one trick is to make sure your file naming & organization is good. They have good documentation on it. Everything's pretty much automatic then, almost zero further work. The naming conventions aren't too bad, and the resulting file tree would be a reasonable way to organize your files regardless.
I actually like the conventions. Movie name and a year in parentheses and then it can be whatever. E.g.
Movie (2016).whatever.zzz/whatever.mkv
Agreed. I honestly chose Jellyfin over plex because I preferred the branding, not sure what I’m missing. I really enjoy Jellyfin, and thy seemingly have support for most devices in some way.
My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She’s non technical and hasn’t had any trouble once I gave her a login.
The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)
> The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)
Tailscale got me outside-the-home Jellyfin with a grand total of maybe 30 minutes of effort, including signing up, getting my server connected, and getting it on my MacBook, AppleTV, and phone. I'd never used it before.
Heh, I just spent 15 minutes debugging a Jellyfin bug where my WebOS client thought that the startup wizard had not been completed yet (I tried restarting it several times, but the thing that did the trick was enabling debug logging and _then_ it started working properly--probably a coincidence). Jellyfin is the best in class, but the bar is in hell. It can't be run in any kind of a high availability configuration, so if your only instance goes down or has any kind of issue, you have to jump on and fix it immediately or you can't use it. When something goes wrong, some of the logs show up in stderr, but most are just written as plain files to a directory. It's free software, so you get what you pay for, but it's pretty buggy.
I gave Jellyfin up and went back to upnp/dlna after the Android and iOS clients would keep losing sync, or wouldn't show me some season of a show, or would pick a white background on white text for a show.
The pain just kept adding up. It was quite nice most of the time. But every single time I reached for my phone, I was wondering how badly it was going to go. Quitting Jellyfin seemed like an excellent choice.
Upnp/dlna is much cruder; very direct raw BubbleUPnP client. But it works so well for me. Their transcoding server also is quite good and I can run it on any machine I want, isn't coupled to anything, can switch between them easily.
Bubbleupnp is also great because it lets me turn tablets into cast screens. I love that so much. Good general protocols rock; having media server, media renderer, then separate control points was a great model, good job UPnP.
I love this kind of project. I am pretty sure the developer had a Wii console sitting around somewhere and thought about how to make it useful again. Wait, I have a PS2 sitting around somewhere…
I can't believe the wifi got a client before ps5
Honestly surprised it took this long. I guess it's less than ideal, since the wii doesn't support modern tv resolutions.
The Wii supports 240p, though, which is very hard to replicate these days.
Or 480i if you want to watch classic anime on a CRT.
It can't really decode 480p/i very well.
The fact that it has component video out makes it a swiss army knife for everything else 240p/480i/480p.
It would be great to get one of these that supports the OpenSubsonic API, which has become a defacto standard for opensource music servers.
Would be music-only, which is sometimes ideal for older devices.
Forced server transcoding for everything. Ouch. Thought maybe at least mpeg2 or something would play directly.
Intel ARC 380's are ideal at 4k realtime transcoded streams. And theyre cheap as well.
You could probably do a sticky round robin reverse proxy with a few backends doing transcode.
The biggest issue is bandwidth, but you probably knew that.
Has anyone tried to horizontally scale jellyfin to running on a multi node cluster?
I'm wanting to set it up for around 20 households to share, and with transcoding that exceeds a single (cheap) node.
For hardware acceleration you might be interested in the remote hardware acceleration strategy...
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/h...
The jellyfin DB itself is unfortunately sqlite instead of being DB agnostic. Maybe you could hack together something such that only one node handles writes and everyone else handles reads... if getting multiple cheap nodes gets your more bandwidth. I have to imagine that jellyfin fairly quickly stops being in charge of the media stream directly.
But yeah I think the transcoding and the size of your data pipe is the only "hard" part. The DB read/writes themselves are going to not be an issue (I think)
The database changes late last year is laying the grounds for other database engines[1].
[1] https://jellyfin.org/posts/jellyfin-release-10.11.0/#the-lib...
Yes, it was annoying, SQLite sucks as single source of truth for clusters, and it cost less than $100 to just buy hardware that can handle multiple high res transcoding sessions at once, but not 20 households' worth.
If you're using Dolphin, it may be worth testing Better-Wii-Menu-DE (https://github.com/Gavin-S-Dev/Better-Wii-Menu-DE).
You could probably have your Wii computer boot directly into Jellyfin using a startup shortcut with 'dolphin-emu -e WiiFin.dol', then switch out of the app to play Wii games using the better menu app.
Then you can your Wiimote for both media + gaming with out needing a keyboard / mouse.
Man what can’t you do with a Wii? Didn’t someone post an article the other detailing how they booted Mac OS X on it?